‘John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin’ (Luke 3:3).

True confession–I love scrunchy Christian pop, like the songs of Lauren Daigle, a Christian singer now soaring up the pop charts. To my dismay, Daigle refused to call homosexuality a sin in a recent interview due to ‘love’ for gay-identified folks, including lesbian activist and TV celeb Ellen Degeneres. Recently a guest on ‘Ellen’, Daigle described her host as ‘a bundle of light.’

Thoughtful mentors might remind the singer that charming people can be morally blind and thus all the more in need of Jesus. To love them means to see them clearly as beloved estranged children of the Father who need to repent.

Any Christian of influence in the world who dares to uphold an authentic vision of chastity (an equal opportunity offender, regardless of the direction of one’s inclinations) runs the risk of losing ‘Ellen’-like platforms. Perhaps Daigle is savvier than we think, hedging her bets by claiming she does not know what the Bible says on the topic. What she may be saying: ‘I can’t afford to offend.’

The Daigles of this world—who sadly include more and more Christian leaders—need the witness of John the Baptist. Advent gives us two full weeks on this firebrand who burned so brightly for the coming King that he exposed kings and their crooked ways. Repentance—including what needed to be renounced–was always his message.

This can make for uncomfortable holiday conversations. In a recent exchange with a truth-seeker, I conveyed how Jesus’ coming in my life prompted me to turn from homosexual practice. The conversation ceased abruptly, yet I took heart: John the Baptist had it worse. King Herod was fascinated by John just as Ellen may have been fascinated by Daigle. Until the prophet challenged Herod’s unlawful union with Herodias, an inconvenient truth which resulted in John’s beheading (Matt. 14:1-12). Merry Christmas.

Preparing for Jesus means ridding ourselves of all compromises to the truth. Father Alfred Delp, a German priest during Hitler’s reign, wrote movingly about Advent as he witnessed the darkness descend on the world like a suffocating blanket. A threat to the powers-that-be, he knew his time on earth was short.

He preached this just before imprisonment in Auschwitz, where he was executed in 1944: ‘Someone who encounters the Ultimate…must let go of every compromise. In the presence of the Ultimate, the only thing that survives is what is authentic. All compromise shatters there. All cheap negotiating shatters there. All half-truths, and all double meanings, and all masks and all poses shatter there. The only thing that stands the test is what is authentic.’

Being authentic means letting go of every hindrance to knowing Jesus, be it a false view of marriage or a disordered bond with another. Of course declaring such truth could cost you your head. Or at least a disruption on the way to fame.